Film Studies: Never trust a Chucky-baby

The guy's name was Chuck Barris. He really existed, and he's still alive, somewhere in his early seventies. He had far more to do with reality television (if such a thing exists) than you want to know. It's his links with reality itself that are in doubt. So let us proceed carefully on the sound principle that whenever an American movie title employs the word "mind", we are being got at.

In the mid-1960s, Chuck Barris began to attract attention as the originator and producer of unbelievable television programmes. The Dating Game was a hit in 1966, with one girl asking questions of three fellows before picking her date. The Newlywed Game was close behind it, involving four couples being asked tasteless questions about their new marriages. But then in 1977, Barris came up with his classic: The Gong Show, which invited amateur or semi-professional or wretched "talent" acts to play before a scathing panel of three "celebrities", any one of whom could gong the contestant into oblivion (and tears).

Both The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game were played "straight", while relying on the titillation of the situation. The Gong Show went far further out, and plainly it was impelled by Barris. The premise of the show was, "For God's sake, this is television! Why do you idiots expect anything worth seeing? Why do you tolerate this ugly farce any longer?" There you are: ask the audience a couple of interesting questions and they're hooked. Many of the "acts" needed more than quotation marks to explain away their ghoulishness. The panel were raucous, nasty, lewd and like spoiled children clamouring for attention and their own lost "celebrity" – sometime "singer", Jaye P Morgan, became the filthiest woman on television. And then there was "Chucky Baby", Barris himself, as the master of ceremonies – a fumbling mop-head, like a puppet with tangled strings: he could hardly move normally, he fumbled his lines and his cues, he was a disaster. And he was as brilliant and endearing as Dean Martin, who also worked the "I don't know why they let me do this" approach.

The show became a hit, but it was also one of the first great exposés of television as debacle. And while Chuck Barris (who had not really performed before) became as much the epitome of stupidity as a fourth Stooge, he later published a book, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which set his bizarre television notoriety in the larger context of having been an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (including a ruthless assassin).

The book was routinely shelved with "comedy" and written off as Chucky-baby's mocking attempt to undermine confessional autobiography in just the same way he had disrupted the etiquette of the television game show. (You must grasp a basic cultural difference here: in Britain, game shows appeal to the general public's thirst for knowledge – asking difficult questions can entertain millions of people who do not know the answers. In America nobody wants to know anything – in case they're ever called to testify.) I stretch a point? Maybe. Then again, maybe the cover was brilliant – and maybe this fake confessional was the one way Chuck had to throw sleuths off his scent. To put it another way, just as I mistrust an American film that uses the word "mind" (A Beautiful Mind) so I am very suspicious of any American organisation inclined to own up to "intelligence".

Take yet another approach: does the conduct of American affairs and national security in the age of the CIA suggest anything but the presence of failed actors, chronic performers and amiable idiots?

Yes, you've guessed right (we always guess right in American games): there is now a movie of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, scripted by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) from Barris's book, directed by George Clooney (yes, that George Clooney) with Sam Rockwell (quite good) as Chucky Baby. The film is a mess, but why not? What is really intriguing about it is the subtle or inadvertent ways in which it parodies all those "mad dream" sequences from the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind. You see, what I'm getting at really is that the larger claims of sanity, order or truth in the USA are not doing well. Anyone could be anything.

There's a way in which this subversiveness, and the humour attached, are to be welcomed. On the other hand, there is a sudden piercing glimpse of a huge, very anxious mob that has just realised how far, in 50 years, it has lost its faith in everything – the presidency, the military, our security, our economy. Or television, and knowing the answers to questions.

And it's dangerous – no one doubts that.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk